Erich Honecker

Erich Honecker (25 August 1912-29 May 1994) was General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany from 3 May 1971 to 18 October 1989, succeeding Walter Ulbricht and preceding Egon Krenz. In this position, he led East Germany until weeks preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Biography
Erich Honecker was born in Neunkirrchen, Saarland, German Empire in 1912, and he joined the Communist Youth League in 1926 and the Communist Party of Germany in 1929. Following the Nazi takeover in 1933, he went underground, but was captured in 1935 and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in 1937. Liberated by the Red Army in 1945, the Soviet commanders of eastern Germany put him in charge of building up the communist youth movement, the FDJ, whose leader he remained until 1955. A member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany's Central Committee since 1945, he joined the Politburo in 1958 and replaced Walter Ulbricht as its First Secretary in 1971. During his leadership, th eeconomy was the most successful in the communist world, which was partly owing to large hard-currency payments from West Germany which set in with the new Ostpolitik in return for humanitarian improvements in East Germany. His leadership became challenged after the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, whose policies of glasnost and perestroika he was unwilling to follow. After unprecedented popular demonstrations sparked off by Gorbachev's visit to the country in 1989, which increasingly challenged the nature of the Communist regime itself, Honecker was forced to resign on 18 October 1989. After German reunification, he stood trial for manipulating elections and for being responsible for those who died at the Berlin Wall, but in 1993 he was released because of ill health.